7/4/12 12:34 PM EDT

Earlier this week, Fehrnstrom said in a TV appearance that Romney has the same view as the White House on the individual mandate: that it's a penalty, rather than a tax. Romney instituted a state-level mandate to buy health insurance as governor of Massachusetts.

But Romney shifted gears in a sit-down with Jan Crawford, declaring that President Barack Obama broke his pledge not to raise taxes by imposing the individual mandate.

“While I agreed with the dissent, that’s overtaken by the fact that the majority of the Court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said. “The American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made — said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

CBS hasn't posted the full video of Romney's interview yet, so it's not clear if Romney addressed Fehrnstrom's comments, or whether his remarks on the mandate today mean he also raised taxes in Massachusetts. Republicans have urged Romney to campaign comprehensively against the law known as Obamacare, even if that means talking around his record as governor.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign responds in a statement hitting Romney as a flip-flopper: "In an interview with CBS today, Mitt Romney contradicted his own campaign, and himself. First, he threw his top aide Eric Fehrnstrom under the bus by changing his campaign's position and calling the free rider penalty in the President's health care law — which requires those who can afford it to buy insurance — a tax. Second, he contradicted himself by saying his own Massachusetts mandate wasn't a tax — but, Romney has called the individual mandate he implemented in Massachusetts a tax many times before. Glad we cleared all that up."

The easiest and most honest position to defend here would be that both the Massachusetts and the federal mandates are behavior-based tax penalties, as distinct from broad-based tax increases. But that's a position neither camp has taken so far.

UPDATE II: In longer interview excerpts released by the Romney campaign, the Republican candidate argues that there's a distinction between a state mandate and a federal mandate when it comes to taxation. The Supreme Court said the federal government can only impose a mandate as a tax, Romney argues, but that doesn't mean a state mandate has to be defined as a tax.

It's a semantic and legalistic (you might say artificial) distinction, which sidesteps the practical point that the health insurance mandates are functionally comparable. Here's the excerpt the Romney campaign released:

CRAWFORD: “But does that mean that the mandate in the state of Massachusetts under your health care law also is a tax? I mean, you raised taxes as governor.”

ROMNEY: “Actually, the chief justice in his opinion made it very clear that at the state level, states have the power to put in place mandates. They don’t need to require them to be called taxes in order for them to be constitutional. And as a result, Massachusetts’ mandate was a mandate, was a penalty, was described that way by the Legislature and by me, and so it stays as it was.”

CRAWFORD: “So at the state level because of … you’re saying the Supreme Court says that’s different, that the federal government — the powers are different between the states and the federal government? Does that make sense to you?”

ROMNEY: “Just take a read of the opinion. The chief justice said that states have what’s known as police power, and states can implement penalties and mandates and so forth under their constitutions, which is what Massachusetts did. But the federal government does not have those powers, and therefore for the Supreme Court to reach the conclusion it did — that the law was constitutional — they had to find it was a tax, and they did. And therefore Obamacare’s a tax. Like it or not, it’s a tax.”

A key question, going forward, is just how much Romney will make this a part of his campaign pitch. Will he actually hit the trail and try to argue that Obamacare imposed a tax in the form of an individual mandate, but his health care law didn't? Or is this a way for Romney to get out of the way of the it's-a-tax argument that congressional Republicans want to make, before getting back to his own message on the economy?